Life Saved By Book In Papua Eruption

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30763, 29 May 1965, Page 2

Life Saved By Book In Papua Eruption

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright)

PORT MORESBY, May 28.

A woman journalist, who says a book she wrote saved her life, retired today after 16 years’ work in Papau-New Guinea. She is Miss Kate Vellacott-Jones, the administration’s principal information officer.

Miss Vellacott-Jones said today she missed death in the disastrous 1951 eruption of Mount Lamington in East Papua because she stayed behind in Port Moresby that week-end to correct proofs of her book, “Ticket to Burma.”

She had planned to go to the Government station at Higatura, on the spur of Mount Lamington, on the week-end of the eruption, but stayed behind at the last minute when proofs of her book arrived from Sydney. Nearly 3000 people, including 35 Europeans, died in the eruption, which wiped out Higatura. Miss Vellacott-Jones was the first journalist to reach the scene of the disaster.

“I walked though one thousand bodies that day. I will never forget it,” she said. Miss Vellacott-Jones, who is 57, was also the first woman to walk the famed Kokoda Trail. She did this with a Papua-New Guinea Volunteer

Rifles party, carrying a full fifty-pound pack.

A Canadian, Miss VellacottJones formerly owned a weekly newspaper near Edmonton, Alberta. She appeared on 8.8. C. television programmes before the Second World War. In Australia she worked with the Sydney “Daily Telegraph” and the Australian Broadcasting Commission and was the first senior woman journalist to be assigned to the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Canberra.

From 1944 to 1946 Miss Vellacott-Jones served with the Womens’ Auxiliary Service (Burma) in Burma, In-, dia, Java, Sumatra and Japan. She came to Papua-New Guinea for the A.B.C. in 1949 and joined the administration in 1953 as its first public relations officer. Miss Vellacott-Jones will take up a new post as overseas roving reporter for Canadian broadcasting stations later this year.